proper return for his pounds, shillings, and pence; you would turn up
your nose at twenty per cent. There was a great deal about Ireland,--
not her wrongs, thank Heaven! but her fisheries; a long inquiry what had
become of the pearls for which Britain was once so famous; a learned
disquisition upon certain lost gold mines now happily re-discovered; a
very ingenious proposition to turn London smoke into manure, by a new
chemical process; recommendations to the poor to hatch chickens in ovens
like the ancient Egyptians; agricultural schemes for sowing the waste
lands in England with onions, upon the system adopted near Bedford,--net
produce one hundred pounds an acre. In short, according to that paper,
every rood of ground might well maintain its man, and every shilling be,
like Hobson's money-bag, "the fruitful parent of a hundred more." For
three days, at the newspaper room of the Union Club, men talked of this
journal: some pished, some sneered, some wondered; till an ill-natured
mathematician, who had just taken his degree, and had spare time on his
hands, sent a long letter to the "Morning Chronicle," showing up more
blunders, in some article to which the editor of "The Capitalist" had
specially invited attention, than would have paved the whole island of
Laputa. After that time, not a soul read "The Capitalist." How long it
dragged on its existence I know not; but it certainly did not die of a
maladie de langueur.

Little thought I, when I joined in the laugh against "The Capitalist,"
that I ought rather to have followed it to its grave, in black crape and
weepers,--unfeeling wretch that I was! But, like a poet, O
"Capitalist"! thou Overt not discovered and appreciated and prized and
mourned till thou Overt dead and buried, and the bill came in for thy
monument.

The first term of my college life was just expiring when I received a